Author: rwjordan

With 40 years experience in software development, systems design and engineering and IT operations, and Infrastructure Architecture issues. I am versed in multiple programming languages, Operating Systems and RDBMS, I have work experience ranging from microcomputers and PC’s to multiprocessor mid range Unix systems and clusters. I have experience with both wireless and wired network protocols and mediums. And I've help migrate systems into the Amazon EC2 Cloud from self hosted configurations. I collect old working computers, I'm a published Astro-photographer, I tutor, and teach almost every subject I am knowledgeable in. I have had one internet email or another since 1991. I developed Gopher sites prior to the formation of HTTP/HTML and a few websites since then. I wrote my first 'database' on a DEC PDP-11 for the DECUS Library in 1984. Specialties I specialize in Database systems, and am familiar with almost all types of RDBMS and ISAM systems short of Mainframes. I habitually reverse engineer and document everything I touch.
Posted in Personal

Larry Bugbee

Posted on by rwjordan

I was informed a couple of days ago of the Death of my only true best friend. And you might ask why did someone else have to tell me that. And My only answer is that we don’t see or talk to each other all that often.

Me living in Ireland and Larry in Kent Washington (Seattle) IM and email are the only real practical methods. With the time difference we never managed Zoom or Skype. But he was always in my thoughts. We were best geeks you see and if you know what that means, you will understand.

Our live meeting were almost a catch up competition of who was doing what, with whatever new thing that was going on. More often than not we were on the same technology page.

Matters or life and death or even politics didn’t even rise to the level of mention. And were not missed. The future was bright, and we were immortal.

30 years we could call our friendship having been brought together on a project at Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Lab. On a project that as far as I know continues to operate there, the NIB.

During that time, we operated often in separate areas and in different companies. But always connected in some way. Even our Dogs were best friends. Larry never did forgive me for teaching his Charlie to bark.

He will be missed my many, and I am among them. The world is a lesser place.

I was trying to imagine a funny joke, or a photo that would evoke the two of us, and stumbled upon this one. And it suites, even our self defined importance in the world.

I hope you enjoy it.

Bugs I’ll miss you.

Randy.

Posted in AI, Alexa, Artificial Intelligence, Google Assistant, MyCroft, Open Assistant, Siri

Real meaning of AI

Posted on by rwjordan

I recently attend a conference of AI and Sustainability and came away with a different perspective. I have been doing this investigating for some time at other ‘AI‘ discussions and have resolved an understanding that what is being described as AI, as in Artificial intelligence, is in reality, only an example of the second stage of industrialist Revolution, the electronic analysis of (big) data to control manual (automated) machines.

The only element of the current AI (buzz) business that could be considered intelligent, is the intake, and analysis of data as a front end user interface to existing machine technology. Fundamentally the ‘Intelligence’ is only a programmed response to data changes which adapts limited machines, to adjusting to changes in the data, that it is designed to digest.

There is real AI, real sentience research going on, but it is years away from real applications. What the public has been seeing in Alexa, SIRI, Google Assistant, MyCroft and Open Assistant is just programmed ‘Simulated Intelligent‘ (SI) not real cognitive intelligence.

In the more extensive examples of ‘AI‘ or SI the ‘intelligence’ is just more complex, and adapts to more complex data sets than a simpler one. A device that converses with you is doing more analysis, of voice patterns, language syntax, and context. It does NOT understand what you are saying, it operates only within the limited, but expandable, programmed responses. So if a self driving car kills someone, it’s not the fault of the AI/SI it is the programmers fault for bad programming.

This whole interpretation of SI rather than AI will make for a great deal of Legal entanglements that will last for years. And meanwhile the development of real AI will develop to the point that when (I believe in when) there is a real AI, a sentient, cognitive Intelligence we will have to revisit the entire meaning of being alive.

And maybe then, we can worry about people losing their jobs due to AI.

Posted in Personal

Mint installation on Acer Swift 1

Posted on by rwjordan

After extensive cat training, I managed to get two of our black commandos to pull my custom laptop off the arm of my chair and onto the power connector. And after a visit to the repair shop, and being informed that the custom extended power connection. Hence the opportunity to buy a new laptop. The old custom Clevo Laptop was still as fast the the current batch of off the shelf laptops and the wife didn’t want me to build a new custom laptop. So the hunt was on.

The wish list was for a better screen (HD) Lighted keyboard all metal body, But cheap. I had never taxed the CPU in the old laptop so it could be a slower system, but it had to have an SSD as I had gotten used to one in the Clevo. What I found was a Acer Swift 1

The first thing that was required was to remove Windows 10 as I had no intention to use it. After booting into Windows, I set Fast Boot off, and intercepted the BIOS (F2) and shut off secure boot.

I then booted into my Mint 8.3 USB and wiped the 128GB SSD (Kingston) and installed the Mint Cinnamon 8.3 distro. Almost everything works, there was a issue with the Touchpad locking up at random, and the recommended solution was to set the BIOS for the touchpad to ‘Basic’ from Advanced, but that only helped a bit. However a Kernel update to 4.13 and then 4.15 the touchpad it fully functional.

Only one thing remains, The Swift 1 came with a fingerprint reader. It is not in the listed drivers for Linux, at least not yet because I think it’s too new.

But I’m happy with the the results, and I’m posting this from it.

Acer_Swift_1

PS: The screen is great, the look is great and I can live with the slower CPU. And I didn’t get the lighted Keyboard either 😦

Posted in Linux, Software, Windows

New Linux Mint convert

Posted on by rwjordan

Last Christmas I bought a new ASUS TP200SA netbook(?) for my wife. It was familiar as I have the ASUS C100PA Chromebook, and I love it. This ASUS however came with Windows 10. She wanted it as a windows box as she was sure she needed windows to do some of the work she wanted to do. A false premise, I know, but one that a lot of people have.

And it worked Ok, at first, however Microsoft should never get into specing hardware, in this case, in an effort to produce a Chromebook ‘killer’ that used a similar specification. duo-core, 2GB ram and 32GB of storage. And while this works for a lightweight OS like ChromeOS, this is nowhere near adequate for windows 10. And the issue raised it’s ugly head with the first ‘Update’ that Microsoft forced down on the users who own these.

It doesn’t work, would never have worked, so MS has produced another dud of a product. Don’t buy one of these for Windows 10, you will hate it.

The good news is that I did my research beforehand on this laptop, and there were several people managing to get Linux to boot on them. Mosly having to delete the entire windows 10 partition. So knowing I had a solution I bought this. And when the wife finally got too frustrated with making Windows work, she ask me to convert it.

The previous Linux geeks were using things like Fedora but I wasn’t enamored of that distribution. So I tried out my favorite Linux Mint 18.2 and performed the steps I found here: TP200SA Linux Success! except where they used Fedora I used a live USB stick for Linux Mint 18.2. This work great, and I showed my wife how to use the install after she tried out the live USB.

Everything when great, and the install worked even the touch screen, a good surprise. However on the first reboot to the internal ‘ssd’ in the TP200 the track pad did not work, the touch interface work and I assumed that there was a setting that needed to be changed. Not! But after googling the Elan touchpad, I found this: Elantech Touchpad not working

had the same problem. After googling a lot I found a workaround: in /etc/defaut/grub

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
I added i8042.reset to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”i8042.reset quiet splash”
and then

sudo update-grub
Finally after a restart the touchpad works fine (multitouch included).

And then after I rebooted, it all worked. It does not auto switch to ‘Pad’ mode, but the wife never used that feature anyway, she is delighted to have dumped Windows, and with the addition of the Chromium Browser it synced up with her other Sony Laptop, and she’s using the touch screen all the time. Win!

Posted in history, Personal

Retirement — lingering thoughts.

Posted on by rwjordan

I’m setting here debugging a SQL query from one of the people here, and thinking about my last full day at work before retirement, or what will pass for my retirement. I will be reducing my Career working hours to part time, so not a full retirement. This is not that I couldn’t give it up completely, it’s just that this is a lifeline in the off chance that I might go mad. But in my past, I have been in a quiescence where the boredom has sparked enlightened productivity. My two submissions to the DECUS program Libraries were the result of slow (bored) periods at work. And I have many thought projects, that when I feel the need to perform, will lift me.

But my real thoughts are about how fast I got here. Long ago, I knew that this day would arrive. Part of me believed that I wouldn’t make it this far. But in a flash it’s here. I have done many things, some that will never be done again by others, which makes them hard to share. Other lives I’ve lived are perhaps too personal to share. And due to my upbringing I have done most of these alone. I have never been a full time group member in anyone’s circle, and probably won’t ever be.

So if you are the least bit interested, ask, perhaps I’ll share a story or two (while making new ones in the future)

UPDATE: Well it’s been a year, and I’m done, Retired.

Posted in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Science Fiction

Alien Life, Alien Communication

Posted on by rwjordan

After long thoughts about Alien Communication, SETI and movies like ‘Arrival‘. A brain fart happened when early morning I was awakened to birds outside my window. And the first thought was listening to Shortwave radio where I couldn’t quite make out the code. I could tell communications was in progress, I just wasn’t getting it.

This revelation was immediately, Oh birds, and then the inspiration that if we can’t understand Birds, or Whales or other species who communicate, how would we ever understand an alien communication, or even identify one, should we hear it. What if buried in the background noise of the universe, birds were chirping and singing away and we weren’t paying attention. Forget ‘radio’ transmission Signal/Noise rations what if the signal were the noise, the background ‘birdies’ we hear frequently on the Radio spectrum?

Posted in Amazon, AWS, Cloud, Google, Facebook, Networks

What constitutes the Internet

Posted on by rwjordan

The recent hysteria about the massive and unfortunate AWS outage in US-EAST-1 and their S2 storage issues. Has raised the discussion about the vulnerability of the Internet. First lets be clear here, the Internet is NOT services like Amazon, or Google, or Dropbox, or any one of thousands of ‘Sites’ ON the internet. The Internet did not fail during the AWS outage, Sites on the Internet were offline, as in, “not on the Internet”, or at best unavailable as a facility there on.

The internet is a web, which can be fragile, but is mostly fairly resilient to most things, including facilities being disabled, or unavailable. So when you listen to talk about ‘LOSING the INTERNET’ take it with a grain of salt. It’s probably more about loosing connectivity with someones favorite destination on the Internet, facebook, Netflix whatever and less likely about the Internet actually being down.

Posted in AI, Amazon, Facebook, Google, MyCroft

AI’s are coming, AI’s are here, AI’s are everywhere.

Posted on by rwjordan

With all the talk about AI this and AI that you would think that Artificial Intelligence was easy. What is not apparent is that these AI advances are not native AI. They are the equivalent of thin client environments that connect lesser compute hardware to the real AI’s that reside within more massive environments. These AI (Ailites?) as we can call them, consist of front end audio parser’s (for input) and text to speech programs. In between there is a communications that forwards these parsed ‘language’ requests to a real AI that does the interpretation of the request and creates the text response that will be returned and spoken by the text to speech process on the client.

This all seems pretty interesting, but not a lot different than Apple’s SIRI, Mycroft, Google’s Speak or Amazon’s Alexa. These systems all have one thing in common, and that is to collect information on everything we do. Profiling technologies that will tailor responses and requests but will also record our interests and activities just like our browser activities do.

This are not the AI’s you are looking for. (but may be a lot of fun to play with)

Posted in history, Mars, Science Fiction, Survival

Mars and the nature of Terminal Stupidity

Posted on by rwjordan

One of my favorite Science Fiction writers Larry Niven put this into his notes in the back of a book a long time ago. And I paraphrase:

The two rules for survival are these:
1) Do not argue with a man holding a machine gun.
2) Do not stand next to a man arguing with a man holding a machine gun.

I have often applied these as “Don’t be terminally Stupid, and don’t be near anyone who is acting in a Terminally Stupid manner!”

If anything could place Mars exploration in perspective it would be, Mars is mankind’s stepping away from someone who is acting in a Terminally stupid manner.

If mankind is in the midst of destroying the Earth, or making it uninhabitable, of if you have managed to observe an asteroid headed for Earth, don’t you think it might be time to stand in two places?

Time exercise plan 2; Step away from the guy arguing with the machine Gun, or climate change or asteroids?

We can do Mars!